Mike-Ward.Net

Here’s another intermediate drop of the next version of Tweetz. I’ve made a lot of changes based on feedback but not nearly all of them. If you don’t see a suggestion you’ve made implemented, drop me a reminder.

Let’s start with languages. The gadget currently supports English, Spanish, French, Italian, Latvian, Portuguese (BR), Japanese, Swedish, German and Turkish. That’s a pretty good start and I really appreciate the time people take to do these translations.

Several of you have pointed out that some of the strings (like 2 minutes ago) need positional parameters to deal with word ordering. I’ve added this to all the languages files I currently have. Please check and update as needed. Also, I’ve added a new string (maybe two) that needs translating. When it comes to translations, I really do rely on the kindness of strangers.

Localization support for number formatting has been added. Again, check and let me know if something is wrong.

The biggest changes are in the style sheet loading and layout. I’ve added separate style sheets for docked and undocked forms of the gadget. This allows you to tweak the layout for each size. I’ve also tried to get much more of the layout logic into CSS and out of JavaScript. One somewhat annoying limitation is you can’t set the width of the gadget in the style sheet. It has to be changed via JavaScript. Must be some weird limitation of the gadget platform is all I can figure.

There are new selectors for the fonts which should help you select font sizes for most of the elements in the gadget. Check out css/base.css for an example.

I received a user style sheet that is a variation of the original theme. It’s been added it the themes (reminder, you can switch themes by pressing Ctrl+Q). It’s called it O2 (Original 2). You’ll notice that the docked version of this new theme does not have the user icon. Having different style sheets for the two sizes allows for these kinds of variations.

The panel pop-up for replies, etc. has been changed to activate over the user name instead of the icon. This allows for hiding the icon should you wish.

The latest jQuery release is also included. I remembered to fix the Ajax leak this time. Maybe they’ll fix it in version 1.5.

There’s probably a few other changes in there I forgot to mention. The feedback has been great and I think it’s really improved the gadget. Keep it up.